Mother of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew ordered released from immigration detention

(WASHINGTON) — As candidates and political parties gear up for the 2026 midterm election campaign, the Supreme Court on Tuesday will consider whether long-standing legal limits on coordinated spending — enacted to prevent corruption — violate the First Amendment.

The case was brought by Republican senatorial and congressional campaign committees along with then-Sen. JD Vance and former Rep. Steve Chabot, both Ohio Republicans, against the Federal Election Commission, which is tasked with enforcing the rules.

The coalition seeks to eliminate limits on the ability of parties, which often have a fundraising advantage over individual candidates, to more freely and directly finance TV ads and organizing efforts of candidates they favor. The practice is known as coordinated spending.

Oral arguments will take place before a Supreme Court that has been consistently skeptical of campaign finance regulations on free speech grounds, narrowing the scope of contribution limits and in 2014 famously rolling back caps on corporate campaign spending with the Citizens United decision.

The Trump administration, which controls the FEC, is declining to enforce or defend coordinated spending limits. In its place, the Democratic National Committee and a Supreme Court-appointed attorney will argue for why they should be preserved.

“This has been held constitutional at least twice before by the Supreme Court and more times by lower courts,” said Marc Elias, the Democratic attorney defending the law. “The entire campaign finance system is built upon these limits.”

Congress in 1974 set limits on the amount of money American individuals, organizations and political parties can give directly to candidates, and the Supreme Court has upheld them as permissible protections against bribery in the electoral process.

In 2025, the political contribution limits are $3,500 per person to an individual candidate and $44,300 per person to a national party committee per year, according to the FEC.

At issue in this case are added limits set by Congress on the amount of money a political party can spend in direct coordination with a candidate.

The FEC’s coordinated spending limits are computed based on each state’s voting-age population and the number of members of Congress. For Senate nominees, the cap is between $127,200 and $3.9 million in 2025; for House nominees, the limit is $63,300 in most states, according to the FEC.

Advocates say the spending limits prevent quid pro quo corruption between a candidate and party, and prevent individuals from attempting to circumvent contribution rules by essentially funneling donations to a candidate through the party, which is subject to the higher caps.

“If those contributions, which dwarf the base limits on [individual] contributions to candidates, are effectively placed at a candidate’s disposal through coordinated spending, they become potent sources of actual or apparent corruption,” argue attorneys for Public Citizen, a nonprofit voter advocacy group, in a brief to the high court.

More than a dozen states and independent election watchdog groups have also urged the court to leave campaign-finance rules to legislators, arguing they are better positioned to establish policies for elections than judges are.

The defenders of the limits also contend that the Republican plaintiffs lack legal standing to bring the case. They say that because the Trump FEC is not going to enforce the rules, there is no injury to the parties involved and that Vance and Chabot are not even active candidates for office who would be affected by the coordinated spending limits.

Republicans insist coordinated spending limits are unconstitutional suppression of free speech and that they are ineffective in the purported goal of curbing corruption.

“One of the key functions of a political party is to make sure that its candidates will vote for the party’s platform once in office,” the Republican committees tell the Supreme Court.

The case — National Republican Senatorial Committee, et al. v. Federal Election Commission — is expected to be decided by the end of June 2026 when the Supreme Court’s term concludes.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared ready to limit how a key part of the Voting Rights Act long aimed at protecting equal opportunity for racial minority voters is applied to the drawing of state election maps. 

During oral arguments in a complicated case challenging the drawing of a second majority-black district in Louisiana, the court’s conservative majority suggested race may have improperly predominated as a factor in its creation.

At the same time, it was not clear whether a majority of the court was prepared to issue a more sweeping ruling that any use of race as a factor in redistricting is unconstitutional. 

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has long been a guardrail against states “packing” Black voters into districts and “cracking” communities of color into other districts with an aim of diluting their electoral influence.

Courts that have found a violation of Section 2 then order states to redraw their maps, with an eye on race, to ensure minority voters are given fair chance at political participation. 

The law does not require proof of intent to discriminate — prohibiting any discrimination in effect — but several conservative justices suggested that plaintiffs should have to show at least some possibility of intent, a tougher standard to meet. 

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who could be the key vote in the case, voiced particular concern about the indefinite use of race to draw maps compliant with Section 2.

“This court’s cases in a variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time, sometimes for a long period of time, decades in some cases, but that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point,” Kavanaugh said. 

“What is not grounded in case law,” replied Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which is defending Louisiana’s map, “is the idea that an entire statute should somehow dissolve simply because race may be an element of the remedy.”

The court’s longstanding precedents have said that race cannot be a primary motivating factor when drawing congressional districts under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, but they also grant states have breathing room to consider race in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act. 

The court most recently upheld Section 2 in a 2023 decision. 

“What Section 2 does is to say where the effects [of a congressional map] are discriminatory such that … African Americans here are not being given the same voting opportunities as white people are, then a remedy is appropriate,” Justice Elena Kagan told Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga. “That remedy doesn’t have to be race-based, but sometimes it is race-based in order to correct the racially discriminatory situation that exists.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson most vigorously defended the legacy of Section 2 and its use to create two majority-black districts in Louisiana, describing the Civil Rights-era law as a “tool” to identify racial disparities. 

“It’s like a tape measure that we’re looking [at] as to whether or not certain circumstances exist, and those circumstances that Congress is worried about – unequal access to electoral opportunity,” she said. “That’s why it doesn’t need a time limit, because it’s not doing any work other than just pointing us to the direction of where we might need to do something.”

Justice Samuel Alito said outright that he believed lower courts did not correctly apply the Supreme Court’s precedents around Section 2 to the maps at issue in Louisiana. 

“There’s a serious question about whether the Black population within the district in question in the illustrative map was geographically compact,” he said, referring to one of the legal requirements for a VRA-compliant map. 

A decision in Louisiana’s favor could, at the very least, require the state to redraw its map under more race-neutral criteria ahead of the 2026 midterm election. The two majority-black districts are represented by Democrats. 

A broader conclusion in the case could upend congressional maps nationwide, potentially triggering the redrawing of race-neutral districts in multiple states and in turn putting minority representation at risk in legislatures nationwide.  

Nelson argued that a further rollback of the Voting Rights Act would be “catastrophic.” 

 “If we take Louisiana as one example, every congressional member who is Black was elected from a VRA opportunity district,” she said. “We only have the diversity that we see across the south, for example, because of litigation that forced the creation of opportunity districts under the Voting Rights Act.” 

The court is expected to release a decision before the end of its term in June 2026.  How quickly it releases its ruling could determine whether or not states will have sufficient time to redraw maps — if necessary — before midterm voting begins.

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(NEW YORK) — Following an unprecedented surge in election-related litigation, the Supreme Court on Wednesday will consider reviving a lawsuit challenging an Illinois law that allows officials to count mail-in ballots received within two weeks of election day.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments about the broader question of who has the right to file a federal lawsuit challenging election law, the outcome of which could not only revive the mail-in ballot case but also open the door to a wave of new legal challenges to election laws.

Republican Rep. Michael Bost and two presidential electors filed a lawsuit in 2022 to challenge the Illinois law, arguing that counting mail-in ballots beyond Election Day constitutes an illegal extension of voting beyond the timeframe set in federal law. 

Two lower courts threw out the lawsuit after concluding that the congressman lacked standing — or the legal right to bring a lawsuit — because the plaintiffs could not prove the policy harmed them. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in June, adding to one of the high court’s most consequential terms in recent history.

 President Donald Trump and his allies have long criticized the practice of mail-in voting, using it as ammunition to cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election. In August, Trump vowed to “lead a movement to get rid of” mail-in voting, though his campaign had encouraged voters to use mail ballots. 

“It’s time that the Republicans get tough and stop it, because the Democrats want it. It’s the only way they can get elected,” Trump said then.

When a federal district judge threw out Bost’s lawsuit in 2022, the decision stemmed from the question of whether the congressman and the electors had the grounds to sue, not the merits of his legal argument about mail-in ballots. The court ruled that Bost’s claims about being harmed by the policy — including having to use campaign resources during the post-election ballot counting period — were a “generalized grievance” that did not provide him standing to sue.  

To bring a lawsuit in federal court, a plaintiff generally needs to establish that a particular action injures them, that the action stemmed from the person he or she is suing, and that the court’s solution would resolve the harm.

Together with electors Laura Pollatrini and Susan Sweeney, Bost argues that the mail-in ballot policy not only harms his election prospects but also causes a “pocketbook injury,” because candidates need to continue staffing their campaigns through the ballot-counting period.

“When it comes to elections, candidates running for office plainly have the most at stake. They put their lives on hold and spend countless hours and millions of dollars organizing and running campaigns,” their lawyers wrote. “When the dust settles, the candidates either win or lose, with months of effort and untold expenditures either vindicated or forever lost.” 

The Illinois State Board of Elections has pushed back by arguing that the potential impact on Bost’s “electoral prospects” is too speculative and that political candidates are under no requirement to continue staffing their campaigns after the election, effectively making the injury that Bost claims he suffers voluntary. 

Illinois has also argued that allowing Bost to bring the lawsuit would open the floodgates of frivolous lawsuits “to challenge any election rule on the books for purely ideological reasons” and cause local governments to spend more time fighting lawsuits and less time administering elections.

The Trump administration has supported part of Bost’s argument about having the right to sue over the ballot policy, though Solicitor General D. John Sauer pushed back on the claim that candidates have broad claims to bring election-related lawsuits.

“This Court can …. establish a clear rule for standing to litigate disputes over election laws: candidates have standing to seek prospective relief challenging a rule governing the validity of ballots so long as there is a risk that the ballots at issue could affect the outcome of their election,” Sauer wrote in an amicus brief.

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